Interns of New York: Claire Wind
Claire Wind is a visual designer for ExpandTheRoom. Photo by Ann Bomar
Featured image by Ysabel Cacho
Summer for young adults can mean anything from hibernating for the next three months to taking a road trip with friends. SCAD students, however, know that summertime means internship time. Even when classes started in the fall quarter, professors were already mixing summer internships with homework talk. This summer, several students both currently in school and recent graduates, have ventured into the city of New York, which has famously been described by Gene Kelley, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin as “a hell of a town.”
Claire Wind, a recent graphic design graduate from Canton, Ohio, is ready to take a bite out of the Big Apple. She will work as a visual designer for ExpandTheRoom, a boutique agency in New York that focuses in digital design.
Wind first heard of the agency through a rather unconventional method. “I actually found this job while at a SCAD lecture,” she said. “Some editor was talking about her experiences and instead of listening to her advice, I was researching all of the companies she was name-dropping and I found this job.”
Although Wind starts work later in July, she is prepared for the new job that awaits her, having worked in several internships and CLC programs. Her first internship was at a small PR firm in her hometown. “I was basically the front desk girl, working the phone and filing the paperwork,” Wind said. Although her work was not related to her graphic design major, Wind learned a lot from it. “It was an experience in a professional setting, instead of working the holiday retail job.”
Her second internship was at Bauer Publishing in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, which is right outside of New York. The company was responsible for publishing magazines such as “Life&Style,” “Soaps Weekly” and “InTouch Weekly.” “You know, the ones at the end of the cash register that you really want to pick up but you know you shouldn’t,” said Wind.
She worked in the teenage department, which was responsible for publishing pre-teen favorites such as “J-14, “Twist,” “M” and “Quizfest.” “My days were filled with making layouts for spreads, designing mega posters, and Photoshopping the s*** out of celebrities.”
However it had its perks. “Considering my music taste is like a 12-year-old girl with One Direction and Demi Lovato, it was basically a ‘dream’ job for me,” said Wind. That was until she realized her design style was much more different than her target audience. “Everything I worked on got published, so I am now a published artist, which is cool,” Wind added. “But what I worked on wasn’t [technically] me but ‘J-14.’”
With several internship experiences under her belt, Wind advises interns to not go for an unpaid internship. “You are worth more than that!” she said. She took an unpaid internship and is “still paying for it to this day.”
Wind, who also did CLC work during her time at SCAD, felt she had a “leg up” when applying for jobs. “CLC put me in a real world environment,” she said. “Presenting your ideas, work and results to a client while working with students from different majors and mindsets than you is something that you are going to have to deal with every day in the industry.”
New York is a city that she, like many others, dreamt of working in. Although Wind lived in New Jersey last summer, “being able to jump on a bus and be in Times Square in 15 minutes was surreal.” When she first entered college, she knew this city was where she wanted to be even before she graduated. “Being from a suburb in the Midwest and then moving to a city like Savannah made me realize that there is so much more in this wonderful nation,” Wind said. “New York City is the epicenter of this country and maybe even the world. Everything happens here and that is why I want to be a part of it.”
“The design community here is off the charts so I know I will always be learning from my peers around me,” she added. “So I might as well work with the best to become the best in the future.”
